OCCULT ESPIONAGE

Scratch a Magus, Find a Spy

by Iona Miller, 2007When you begin to look, nearly every historical magus of note was also a spy: Dr. John Dee, Count St. Germain, Cagliostro, Mme. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, etc.Often the occult is used as cover for the even blacker arts.

Magician John Dee spied, spelled and encrypted for Queen Elizabeth I; St. Germain spied in England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland and throughout his travels; Cagliostro is accused of being a Jesuit spy; Blavatsky a Russian spy; Aleister Crowley a double agent who Ian Fleming used to pattern LeChifre, and on it goes...

Tales From the DarksideIs it Crowleyanity or Truth? In the world of Aleister Crowley, it is impossible to say definitively, but the notorious legends surrounding Crowley are nothing if not wildly entertaining. In OCCULT ESPionage we follow the meandering path of Crowley's magickal journey into the shadowlands of psychic warfare, occult spies and occult power visions. The daisey chain connects the worlds of irregular freemasonry to the political machinations of both Hitler and the Bush family.

It is a circuitous route, a widdershins spiral of weird coincidence into a vortex of implausible synchronicity. There is little doubt that Crowley's larger than life occult philosophy and writing influenced virtually all of his contemporary occultists and many of those to follow, as well as artists and musicians. Magick isn't outlawed but it is suppressed through ridicule. Yet it is successfully practiced by the elite (Skull & Bones; Bohemian Club), governments and organized crime.

Crowley's Charisma

Many of his ideas had their roots in the minds of other deep thinkers, but no one executed them with more "energized enthusiasm." Sex Magician, "Wickedest Man on Earth," was he a spy and even possible double-agent, besides? Was Barbara Bush his love child? Was Hitler his doppelganger? Are L. Ron Hubbard and Tim Leary his legacy? Was he Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land?" Was he a culture-jamming crypto-anarchist? The first edge-celeb? Decide for yourself.

SIGMA 666

Crowley was a mercurial character. A Hermetic scholar and practitioner, he wrote "The Book of the Law," "Magick In Theory & Practice," "The Book of Lies"and commissioned his own tarot deck, "The Book of Thoth." Thoth, Hermes, and Mercury are all the same archetypal force or godform.

In ancient Egypt, Thoth was the deity of scribes or writers and magicians, and such a force seems to have blessed Crowley with its particular gifts. Hermes is also an androgyne, the original hermaphrodite, and Crowley wasn't beyond a bit of gender bending with his ceremonial psychodramas ~ he embodied both High Priest and Priestess. In Tarot, the corresponding trump of the Major Arcana is The Magician, The Juggler, The Magus...and he was all that, and more.

The Secret: To Dare, To Will, To Know, To Keep Silent

Intelligence is the key to understanding the world today. What spies have in common with magicians is an uncanny ability to connect the seemingly unconnected, to notice what goes on behind the scenes and to see through misdirection ~ it takes one to know one. Both have learned to synthesize and interprete data, how to pace and lead people (hypno-patsies) with rapport. The opening gambit of psychological warfare and mind control is flattery.

As trained observers, magicians and spies are adept at people-reading and keeping secrets; both are actors -- performers. Both are in secret societies that rely on craft and often use collaborators or confederates, and mentors. How much different is stealth and surveillance than a spell of invisibility? Each have their rules of engagement in the Great Work and the Great Game.

Clandestine Craft

Even some of the elements of tradecraft are the same. Both are cryptic, using encryptions and codes. Each has its own arcane language, symbols and rituals veiled from the profane. Remote Viewing or psychic spying is virtually identical with clairvoyance. Ceremonial psychodrama is played out in public, in personality cults and "ritual" murders.

Both use passwords and slogans for security. Cryptography is now ubiquitous. All domestic and foreign electronic communication is monitored by programs like Echelon. Spies and magicians both are cracking the Brain Code, the wetware of humanity.

Cryptocracy refers to a type of government where the real leaders are hidden. There may possibly be a fake government that appears to be in charge and this fake government might not know themselves that they are not in charge. It can also be used when referring to similar arrangements in organisations, orders, sects and cults.

They understand viscerally that things are often not what they seem. Both are masters of disguise, the hidden environment, intelligence, espionage, and covert action. Both aim to 'tweak the timeline' with small perturbations that pump up to macroscopic results, setting up currents of intentional influence. They also tweak minds by controlling the environment. No one can resist what they cannot detect.

Both are Inside Outsiders, working at the fringes of the System. The "outsider" aesthetic is charged by a desire to break free from the contrivances of tradition. They look boldly outside the system and deep within themselves for inspiration that arises directly from Creative Source.

Both work sub rosa. This phrase comes from the Latin meaning 'under the rose' for confidentiality, black ops. It comes from the Masonic fraternal tradition. The rose is the emblem of Horus, God of Silence and Secrecy, Crowley's "Crowned & Conquering Child."

Wise Guys

The Magnum Opus, the Great Work of alchemy, is the utter transformation of oneself into a being of light, an energy body. Crowley lived larger than life. If his webpresence is any indicator, his legend and influence is bigger than ever. He may have just been lurking in the Astral Plane, waiting for this psychic rebirth. Perhaps, cutting through spacetime, he made a leap of faith into the electronic Astral Plane.

Aleister Crowley is a Conspiracy of One - the number of THE MAGUS.

MAGUS

THE MAGUS Arcana

The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. Like nature, history is cyclic. Drug companies are as powerful as banks and oil. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Corporations compete with nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings.

It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally.The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve?Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail.But this quest can be co-opted for narcissistic or pathological ends.The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.

Secret Missions

Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve?The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret.It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up.That’s why it can’t be told.It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.”The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fount of all manifestation. All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long.Magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge.Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.

Trump Card

A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition.The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly.

"Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites.You alternate between faith and skepticism until you go beyond the ordinary boundaries of both - "slay each thought with its opposite." Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. The Magus lives at the Paradox.

Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.

Arts Magian

A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, divining and reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”

But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.

Metaphysician

Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.

But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.Photons and phonons are quantized modes of vibration. This subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.

Hermetics is a Spiritual Technology

For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether – the Astral Light --a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.Science now describes it as the scalar physics of subspace.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.

The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.

According to Thelemic philosophy, the accomplishment of the Great Work is the discovery of one's True Will the practitioner's Secret Self Hadit in the universe of infinite possibilities Nuit.

According to Thelemic doctrine, it may take many incarnations for one to achieve this Supreme Goal. Each Thelemite finds for himself or herself a unique method for accomplishing the Great Work. Crowley cautions against the "lust of result" for such desire reveals limitations which hinder one's development.

Crowley's occult system initially focuses on attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which will (by assumption) help the practitioner to achieve his or her True Will. The system does not give any absolute rule for reaching this point, nor any certain way to test another person's Holy Guardian Angel.

Professor William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," has well classified religion as the "once-born" and the "twice-born"; but the religion now proclaimed in Liber Legis harmonizes these by transcending them. There is no attempt to get rid of death by denying it, as among the once-born; nor to accept death as the gate of a new life, as among the twice-born. With the A.'. A.'. life and death are equally incidents in a career, very much like day and night in the history of a planet. But, to pursue the simile, we regard this planet from afar. A Brother of A.'. A.'. looks at (what another person would call) "himself", as one --- or, rather, some --- among a group of phenomena. He is that "nothing" whose consciousness is in one sense the universe considered as a single phenomenon in time and space, and in another sense is the negation of that consciousness. The body and mind of the man are only important (if at all) as the telescope of the astronomer to him. If the telescope were destroyed it would make no appreciable difference to the Universe which that telescope reveals.

*******

.....Who makes a good spy or a good liar? I don’t think there’s any one answer to that. Being a good actor, being a good poker player. Being a good con man. Con men are people who are sociopathic, who do not feel remorse, and who are very attuned, strangely, to other people and can read them very well. If I know what you really want to hear and what is in your heart of hearts, your fondest desire, because I’m good at reading you and I’m street-smart about assessing you, then I can feed you what you want to hear. A good con man does that. A good magician does that. You also have to have a good memory.....(Discover Magazine)

MIND PHREAK

Magick Metaprograms

This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Sensory deprivation, loss of equilibrium, confusion techniques, social isolation, physiological stress, severe shock and ceremonial terror tactics were the forerunners of brainwashing techniques.

This is the realm of psychic attack and psychic self defense, of sorcerers stealthily vying with one another for power. Weaponized ESP can affect the body, mind and soul of one's opponent. But it can boomerang back on the sender 3-fold, according to the cautionary prescription.

Undercover

Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.

This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.

By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no metanarratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.If you assume a role does that make it real?If not, fake it till you make it.Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.

Legacy

Another magnetic mercurial personality, Tim Leary, took notes on Crowley's cult of personality.Leary admitted Crowley inspired him and bootstrapped his book 'The Game of Life' (Part 4 of his Future-History Series) from the scientific-occult philosophy of Aleister Crowley and Tarot.He understood Crowley was on a similar path, only using different language. He called Crowley an 'Agent of Evolution.'

LSD rascal-guru Timothy Leary was a Crowley enthusiast. He said: “I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago … He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started.” (Late Night America, Public Broadcasting Network, cited by Hells Bells, Reel to Real Ministries).Leary also had his own relationship with both the mystic arts and the CIA. One of his famous early books was called HIGH PRIEST. He was called "the Pope of Dope.". Both fearlessly explored the outer limits of human potential. Psychologists - essentially psychic engineers - exert both local and remote control on human minds and behavior. see http://espionagecentral.50megs.com

THE OCCULT GRAIL

The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally. The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve? Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail. But this quest can be coopted for narcissistic or pathological ends. The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.

Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve? The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret. It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up. It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.” The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fountain of all manifestation.

All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long, for magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge. Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition. The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly."Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites. Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death.

Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.

A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”

But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.

Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.

But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.It's subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.

For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether, a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.

The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.

This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.

This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.

By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no meta-narratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.

If you assume a role does that make it real? If not, fake it till you make it.Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.

Mercurial Espionage

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The Mysterious Dr Dee One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.

In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.

While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.

Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.

It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.

After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.

Rudolf Hess & the British Occult Connection

During World War II British Intelligence invited many occultists into its ranks because it needed their specialist knowledge and skills. The assistant director of Naval Intelligence during the war was Lt. Commander Ian Fleming RN, best known later as a thriller writer and the creator of the famous fictional spy James Bond 007. Fleming was also interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests (see ‘The Magus Was A Spy’ by Dr Richard Spence in New Dawn No. 105, November-December 2007).

Ian Fleming conceived an audacious plan to lure a high-ranking member of the German government into defecting to Britain so as to provide a morale-boosting propaganda coup. This idea had been inspired by a novel written by Fleming’s brother, Peter, called Flying Visit (Jonathan Cape 1940). Peter Fleming was a journalist and also worked for both MI5 (the Security Service) and the propaganda section of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE). The novel imagined that Hitler’s plane crash-landed in England and he was captured. The Reichminister and deputy fuehrer himself, Rudolf Hess, was chosen as a suitable candidate for the actual plot. This was because he was a supporter of peace with Britain and was also under the influence of astrologers and occultists. It was believed this could be used against him.

Commander Fleming recreated The Link, a defunct Anglo-German friendship society of the 1930s that had a wealthy membership of Nazi sympathisers drawn from the British Establishment. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, The Link had been founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, an ex-director of the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), after he retired in 1930. Domville was arrested and interned in May 1940 because MI5 believed he was plotting a fascist coup d’etat supported by aristocratic peacemongers. The admiral was a friend of Major-General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller CBE, a famous military analyst who designed the tactics for the first tank battle in World War I. Fuller also invented the concept of blitzkrieg used so successfully in World War II by the German Panzers. Fuller was an open admirer of Hitler (he attended the fuehrer’s 50th birthday party in 1939), a leading member of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), a friend of Ian Fleming and a leading disciple of Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s Fuller formed the extreme-right wing Nordic League (aka the White Knights of Britain), allegedly established by Nazi agents. However in the 1950s he was a member of a MI6 supported group of Russian émigrés engaged in anti-communist propaganda. It has been suggested that Fuller was not interned during the war with other leading fascists such as Mosley and Domville because he was a MI6 double-agent.

Ian Fleming’s idea was to persuade the German High Command in Berlin, and especially Rudolf Hess, that when war broke out The Link had not disbanded but had gone underground. It had allegedly regrouped and recruited even more prominent pro-Nazi members in the British Establishment including aristocrats and royalty. These were represented by the NID as influential people with the political muscle to overthrow prime minister Winston Churchill’s national wartime government, call a ceasefire and agree to a peace treaty with Germany. Under its terms Britain would keep control of its Empire and Germany would have free reign in occupied Europe. The Nazis also hoped that British troops would be sent to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht and the SS against the Soviet Union in a joint anti-communist crusade.

Hitler did not want to invade and occupy Britain. Instead he would have preferred to negotiate a treaty with a sympathetic new government in London. It has been suggested that the only reason the fuehrer abandoned Operation Sea Lion – the proposed invasion of Southern England – and instead invaded the Soviet Union was to force Churchill to accept peace terms. If the Red Army had been defeated Britain would truly have been standing alone, as Hitler did not believe the Americans had the political will to enter the war. Unfortunately he underestimated the ability and resolve of the Soviets to defend their motherland and also the clandestine support that the US was already offering Great Britain.

The NID plot to ensnare Rudolf Hess used bogus astrological predictions combined with political intelligence. Hess was persuaded that a Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Hamilton, was willing to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the influential people at the top of British society who wanted to end the war. The duke had met Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the deputy fuehrer for some reason thought he was a member of the surviving Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ian Fleming commissioned an astrologer to produce a faked astrological forecast indicating that 10 May 1941 would be a propitious date for Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland and meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the so-called British ‘peace party’. Hess’ occult advisors had also told him there would be an unusual planetary conjunction on 10 May. On that day six planets would be aligned in the zodiac sign of Taurus and conjoined to the full moon. At the same time Hitler’s chart showed ‘malefic’ astrological aspects. Hess saw himself in the role of a messianic hero saving Germany from possible future defeat by making peace with the British. All the (false) reports reaching the deputy fuehrer about the political situation in England and the astrological aspects convinced him that his mission would be a success.

Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 in the firm belief that on landing he would be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent and whisked off to London for a private audience with King George VI. He had been convinced by the misinformation fed to him by British Intelligence that these three men represented a genuine peace movement capable of removing the warmonger Churchill and agreeing to German terms. Hess had also previously met the Duke of Windsor when he had visited Berlin before the war. As a result Hess was persuaded that some members of the German-descended royal family were sympathetic to Nazism. Certainly the Duke of Saxo-Coburg, formerly Prince Charles Edward, a grandson of Queen Victoria and a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, had willingly embraced Nazism. In fact Hitler had appointed him as the head of the German branch of the Red Cross that was responsible for exterminating the mentally sick and physically disabled.

Unfortunately instead of meeting pro-Nazi aristocrats and royals when he landed, Hess was captured by a local farmer and a Home Guard unit. They handed him over to the police and he was transferred to London to be interrogated by MI5. Unfortunately the British government completely mishandled the capture of Hess. It has been suggested that Churchill believed the subterfuge by the NID and SIS suggesting leading members of the British Establishment might be pro-German may have been based on fact. For that reason the government did not capitalise on Hess’ ‘peace mission’. The German High Command had also disowned him and said that his flight had been unauthorised. They also suggested that Hess might be insane so his value for propaganda purposes was undermined and diminished.

Rudolf Hess’ apparent defection caused widespread panic in Berlin concerning the influence of occultism on the Nazi Party. The Gestapo immediately launched Operation Aktion Hess. On the direct orders of Hitler, they rounded up hundreds of occultists, psychics and astrologers, including Hess’s leading occult advisor Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. In June 1941 a decree was issued banning all public performances of clairvoyance, astrology, fortune-telling or telepathy. Anybody associated with Hess and his esoteric interests was thrown into concentration camps and occult secret societies were closed down. Because of staff shortages in the Gestapo, officers from the Naval Intelligence Service were drafted in to interrogate some of the arrested psychics. It has been claimed that they recruited some of them for secret operations using dowsing on maps with pendulums to hunt down British submarines.

It has also been claimed that Ian Fleming and the NID was involved in a plot to silence the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the penultimate person to be charged under the old Witchcraft Act of 1736. She was arrested in 1944 after holding a séance during which allegedly the spirit of a dead sailor from the sinking of the HMS Bolham physically manifested. As the news of the loss had not been publicly released, and the Admiralty was keeping it secret for morale purposes, Duncan became a target for the security services. She and other psychics were regarded as a serious threat to national security and they became the object of a MI5/NID dirty tricks operation to silence leaks. This suggests that the Intelligence Services actually believed these mediums had genuine powers. Duncan’s arrest and subsequent trial, which in fact was condemned by Winston Churchill as a waste of public funds, was allegedly meant to deter other mediums. The War Office was paranoid that military secrets about the forthcoming D-Day landings in Normandy would be revealed at séances and become public knowledge or passed to the Germans.

In my previous post on The Cult of Intelligence, I speculated that Aleister Crowley’s cult in Cefalù, the “Abbey of Thelema”, had research goals similar to those of MK ULTRA.

I’ve since read more about the “Abbey” and was shocked to find that not only did Crowley’s cult anticipate the more sensational MK ULTRA research, but Crowley employed sophisticated “social influence” techniques which I wrote about in The Banality of Mind Control. Crowley’s cult drew from Freud’s theories and attacked the family just like the Sullivanian cult would do nearly forty years later. Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was the forerunner to much American-lead mind control research during the twentieth century.

This matters, readers, because while Crowley probably did have some genuine interest in the occult, he was always an intelligence agent first and foremost. Crowley viewed the world through an ‘intelligence’ lens– and did so since 1913 at least, when he wrote this on a visit to Russia:

Though little agitation was apparent in the general atmosphere of the Fair [at Nizhny Novgorod] the shrewd, astute, subtle, linx-eyed, past master, analytical, psychic, eerie, hard-bitten Secret Service Chief could nose there was a certain discontent with the regime. [From Crowley’s notes to his poem The Fun of the Fair.]

Everything that Crowley touched was open to being used by Britain’s intelligence services. This seriously undermines the religious sincerity of the occult work Crowley undertook, and leads me to wonder why Anglo-American spooks were promoting Crowley’s brand of the occult in their home territory.

Not only were Anglo-American spooks promoting ‘Crowleyesque’ occult ideas; this promotion was sustained over the course of nearly seventy years and spread to the USA by way of NYC. From his base in NYC, British/Canadian spy William Stephenson set up what became America’s ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ in the early Forties; in the 1950s the CIA’s MK ULTRA project dutifully jumped in where Crowley’s ‘mind control’ work had run out of money.

How close was Crowley to William Stephenson’s NYC spy machine? Crowley earned his American spy-boots in New York City during WWI. He worked to discredit anti-war and anti-British sentiments by pretending to be a rabid, pro-German, pro-Irish Nationalist pundit. Biographer Richard Spence believes Crowley played a role in the sinking of the Lusitania, which was used to pull America into WWI. Crowley had mastered Stephenson’s bag of tricks when ‘Intrepid’ was still a boy in school.

I suggest, readers, that the genesis of organizations like the OSS and CIA lies in the careers of Aleister Crowley and like-minded men. Seeing as the entire world is, in one way or another, suffering from the consequences of these mens’ choices, I believe it’s worth our time to reexamine what Crowley was doing.

While Crowley had a shockingly sophisticated understanding of mind-control techniques, he hadn’t quite figured out who were the best targets for recruitment– Crowley had a lot of disillusioned followers, and by the time of his death only Jack Parson’s Los Angeles chapter was still on good terms with “The Beast”.

Finding the right target is important. My suspicion is that a large part of the MK ULTRA project aimed at identifying good targets for control, or encouraging the formation of more good targets. That’s where Crowley struggled, and I’ll be looking at the work of John W. Gittinger and his Personality Assessment System in the future.

Right now, let’s get on with Crowley and what he learned from the abortive ‘Illuminati’.

Throughout history, many intelligence professionals have been interested in the occult; by ‘occult’ I mean practicing magic and employing ‘secret knowledge’ to bring about their own will. I believe that the reason for this dual-interest is because both the occult and espionage are about establishing “systems of control”, they’re a natural pairing.

The behavior of large numbers of people must be managed efficiently. For this reason, persuaders develop “systems of control” that rely on basic rules and roles of socialization and that impart a sense of belonging. When interaction among people is restricted to interchange between their social roles, however, it becomes easier for ethical, moral, and human concerns to take a back seat. [From On Resisting Social Influence, with Susan Andersen]

Running an intelligence agency requires controlling large numbers of people; people who may not always feel it’s in their interest to cooperate with their intel handlers. Cults, secret societies and criminal organizations all face this same organizational problem– it’s not enough to collect information, a leader must have reliable minions to act on the information. The intelligence community’s ‘cooperation’ problem has been around a long time.

The significance of the Illuminati lay not in its political effectiveness (it existed a little more than eight years), but rather in its method of internal organization. In borrowing freely from both the Jesuits and the Freemasons, Weishaupt created an extremely subtle system of control based on manipulation of the passions. Borrowing the idea of examination of conscience from the Jesuits and sacramental confession from the Catholic Church to which the Jesuits belonged, Weishaupt created a system of “Seelenspionage” that would allow him to control his adepts without their knowing that they were being controlled…

Weishaupt had not just issued a manifesto calling for revolution, he had created a system of control that would create disciplined cells which would do the bidding of their revolutionary masters often, it seemed, without the slightest inkling that they were being ordered to do so…

Weishaupt took the idea of examination of conscience and sacramental confession from the Jesuits and, after purging them of their religious elements, turned them into a system of intelligence gathering, spying, and informing, in which members were trained to spy on each other and inform their superiors. Weishaupt introduced what he called the Quibus Licet notebooks, in which the adept was encouraged to bare his soul for the inspection of his superiors…

Weishaupt created a technique of what came to be called “Seelenspionage,”or spying on the soul, whereby the superiors in the Illuminati could get access to the adept’s soul by close analysis of the seemingly random gestures, expressions, or words that betrayed the adept’s true feelings.

As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.

I was struck by the similarity between Weishaupt’s methods and the potential of the PRISM dragnet spying program; or government programs like the ‘Insider Threat Initiative‘. It seems that “systems of control” haven’t changed much since 1777. According to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, one of the first mystics Crowley studied was a protegé of Adam Weishaupt’s, Karl von Eckartshausen.

The Illuminati was an Enlightenment organization and therefore lacked an important element: the certainty and totality of God. After a few years Weishaupt began to quarrel with his aristocratic co-founder and the organization splintered. Later students of ‘mind-control’ recognized that Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ could be strengthened by exploiting the power of belief and investing the cult’s leadership with supernatural powers. Dr. John Dee’s occult writing was a natural place to look for inspiration; early in his career Crowley made a point of copying Dr. Dee’s writings during one of his trips to Oxford University.

Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) was part of Queen Elizabeth I’s espionage network; he was a mathematician and is credited with smuggling crucial navigation instruments out of Belgium which helped Her Majesty’s Navy remedy their ‘technology gap’. As he got older, he became more interested in Kabbalah and ‘controlling spirits’ through magical means. Dee came under the influence of a fraudster and confidence artist named Edward Kelley, who claimed to be able to talk to spirits and raise the dead.

The later half of Dee’s life was something of a tragi-comedy, as he loaned his library, his wife and his fortune to Kelley in exchange for Kelley’s cooperation in ‘talking with angels’ and uncovering magical secrets (and power). The product of this slow fleecing was a book titled Monas Hieroglyphica which is interpreted as a guide to Enochian Magic– invoking and controlling spirits.

Aleister Crowley saw the potential of fusing Weishaupt’s system and Kelley’s ‘Enochian Magic'; Crowley put this hybrid cult in the service of Britannia’s spooks at Cefalù.

Crowley’s Cefalù psyop was one that any student of cult dynamics would recognize: he established a system of control by encouraging isolating behavior and unhealthy power-worship. The ‘Abbey of Thelema’ appears to be his largest mind-control undertaking and his longest sustained media assault. It was also his most cynical abuse of his followers: Crowley began by recruiting two young, working-class, single mothers (Leah Hirsig and Nina Shumway) for his ‘sex magick’ and then used them to garner publicity through prurient media stories about orgies and bestiality.

The best reference I’ve found for details on the Cefalù cult is in the sympathetic biography of Crowley by Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. The following quotes come from this book and show which control tactics ‘The Beast’ learned from Adam Weishaupt, as identified by E. Michael Jones.

She [Leah Hirsig] persuaded Crowley to review Shumway’s [Nina Shumway] magical diaries for the period. (All members of the Abbey kept such accounts to chart their spiritual progress.) Upon doing so, Crowley was “utterly appalled at the horrors of the human heart. I never dreamed such things were possible. I am physically sick– it is the greatest shock of my life. I had this mess in my own circle. It poisoned my work; it murdered my children.”

How Shumway’s alleged depravity ran against Crowley’s teaching is difficult for me to determine.

What about Weishaupt’s compromising “sexual histories”? One of the chief purposes of the ‘Thelemic Abbey’ at Cefalù was to encourage acolytes to engage in compromising sexual acts; the more lewd the better– better for ‘magick’, of course! Crowley’s personal homosexual proclivities were very useful to that end; he offered himself to at least one male acolyte as a painted, cheap, old “New Orleans” hooker. (See the wall painting below!) The acolyte wasn’t interested.

You can’t talk about Aleister Crowley without talking about sex. Sex is useful to manipulators only if it can be diverted down the right channels. I’ll remind readers of Siskind’s observations on how sex was used by the Sullivanians:

The developement of my sexuality and my sense of myself as a sexual being was deeply affected by my experiences with Ralph Klein [a Sullivanian leader]. His voyeuristic comments and attitude impacted me in the sense that I believe I acted in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. My early experimentation with sexual activity may or may not have taken place without his input, but I don’t think that my objectification of myself would have been the same. I was taught to distance my sexual feelings from my other emotions. Thankfully, I wasn’t always able to achieve this separation; but at certain points in my life I did have sexual encounters that were fairly impersonal. In the Sullivan Institute community, for anyone to become deeply emotionally involved with one person was considered dangerous.

Sex is useful for isolation if it can be divorced from its role in creating family. (Amy Siskind was also discouraged from having children by her Sullivanian manipulators.) Promoting promiscuous sex (sex that will never build strong relational bonds) or sex that will never result in offspring, is a great way of misguiding people’s natural tendency toward forming family groups and ensuring Nature will never pull the follower away from the cult.

Crowley’s particular take on using sex for isolation was perverting it towards power-worship by making it just another magical tool for self-aggrandizement. Crowley was interested in heterosexual sex and sodomy toward this end. You can read a sympathetic account of Crowley’s “sex magick” here:

Rejecting the prudish hypocrisy of the Victorian Christian world in which he was raised, Crowley identified sex as the most powerful force in life and the supreme source of magical power. Taking an apparent delight in outraging the British society of his time, Crowley made explicit use of the most “deviant” sexual acts — such as masturbation and homosexuality — as central components in his magical practice. At the same time, Crowley was also one of the first Western authors to take an interest in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Tantra… One need now only browse the shelves of any Barnes and Noble bookstore or surf the endlessly proliferating web-sites on the Internet to discover the secrets of Tantra, Sex Magick and Tarot, practice Tantra without Tears or even engage in Wicca for Lovers. [From Unleashing the Beast by Keith Urban]

The excerpt above comes from an essay which ends with this question:

Thus, one might well argue that we are now living in a kind of “post-orgy world,” after all the great social and sexual revolutions have broken every imaginable taboo. Yet this has left us in a strange “undefined state,” in which we are left questioning our very being. As Jean Baudrillard observes, “The orgy is over, liberation is over…After a culture based on prohibition…this is a culture based on the questioning of one’s own definition: ‘Am I sexed? What sex am I?’…Liberation has left everyone in an undefined state…This is why there’s so much love-making.” [121] After all, as Crowley seems to have asked himself in the end, what is there left to do after every forbidden desire has been indulged and every taboo transgressed?

I’ll answer Urban by reminding him that Crowley’s initial followers were single mothers who struggled to make ends meet. After the orgy comes old age and children– after the orgy comes vulnerability– and the desire for protection from the powerful, at any price. Crowley understood vulnerability before he even got started in Sicily; he knew that single, vulnerable, mothers would make reliable followers. There would be no point burdening himself with other men’s children if Crowley didn’t understand how to exploit single mothers’ vulnerability.

Crowley’s Cefalù cult had anti-family ideology based on Freud’s theories which the Sullivanians would copy almost forty years later:

Crowley gave Hansi [Hirsig’s boy] and Howard [Shumway’s child]– whom he nicknamed “Dionysus” and “Hermes”– their first lessons in rock climbing. As they were mere toddlers, the ascents he chose must have been mercifully short. But the attitude Crowley displayed here was typical. Under his Thelemic creed, children were to be raised with full freedom to explore their talents and interests. Parents– especially mothers– were to refrain from fussing and over-protecting. The absence of hovering care, Crowley believed, could reduce the impact of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the remnants of which Crowley abhorred in himself.

Freedom from “fussing and over-protecting” can have different interpretations, so let me elucidate: little Hansi and Howard’s freedom from hovering parental care was ensured by Crowley, Hirsig and Shumway’s raging drug addictions. Conditions were so bad for the boys that when Hirsig’s sister came to rescue Hansi, she was given immediate custody on the grounds that the Abbey– a remarkably dirty place per Crowley’s orders– was unfit for children. At the time that Hirsig lost custody of Hansi, she was in Paris with Crowley on one of his many missions there.

Crowley understood how to isolate by attacking the family, immediate and extended, as early as 1907 when he tried to make a disciple of the Earl of Tankerville. The Tankerville incident occurred well before Cefalù, but it shows the depth of Crowley’s understanding:

For all his nervousness and vices, Tankerville was devoted to his family– a trait Crowley viewed as a sentimental encumbrance from which his student required extraction…

The Earl’s wife remained a persistent distraction, as were the children. It was essential that they [Crowley and the Earl] make a Great Retirement together. Crowley decided upon Morocco, by way of Paris, Marseilles, and Gibraltar. “I was of course in paradise,” Crowley wrote, “to be once more among Mohammedans, with their manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety and self-respect!” The trip was, plainly, a fulfillment of Crowley’s own desires, with the further hope that Tankerville, once forced into unfamiliar and rigorous conditions, would cast aside his Anglo-Saxon fears and prejudices. This was Crowley’s standard prescription for spiritual transformation… [From Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

In the Middle East and North Africa homosexuality is not exactly encouraged but they do turn a blind eye to it, so the appeal for Crowley is clear. If you’ve ever noticed how expatriates’ behavior can come unhinged in an alien culture, you’ll understand why Crowley would wish to take his aristocratic quarry there. The Earl was not a good choice for indoctrination and quickly saw through Crowley in Morocco.

If Crowley could convince a target to join the Abbey, then life for them in Cefalù was highly regimented– just as life was for the Sullivanians, Siddha Yoga followers and for people in many other cults:

The training time frame would be just over three months. There would be an initial three days during which one was treaded graciously as a guest with an orientation on Abbey life. After this, one was either to leave or set to work. If the latter choice was made, there would be a day of silence, followed by three days of instruction, and then the taking of a solemn Magical Oath to pursue the Great Work pursuant to the teachings of Crowley’s A:.A:.. The remaining weeks were devoted principally to the study of Crowley’s writings, as well as careful yogic and magical practice (all to be carefully recorded in a diary, which was to be left available for others at the Abbey to read, so that all could learn from each other’s work) and manual labor essential to abbey functions… As for recreation, the Thelemites frequently shocked the Cefalù natives by their preference for nude bathing.

Regimented lifestyles are part of what Zimbardo termed “Basic Training in Compliance”. Crowley established a greeting ritual which everybody at the Abbey had to use: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” followed by “Love is the law, love under will”. If you didn’t use this greeting, you were evicted from the building. :)

Crowley also exploited what Zimbardo identified as “saturation and detachment”: Acolytes at the Abbey were not allowed to read beyond Crowley’s teachings, if they were, they were punished. Crowley painted a special room with pornographic scenes that he wanted his followers to immerse themselves in and become desensitized to– more on that later. In a nutshell: Crowleyesque weirdness had to become the new ‘normal’ for Thelema devotees.

Crowley was a great believer in pushing his students to the limit through means including intensive verbal abuse: The more difficult the training, the more a student would gain– if he was worthy… [Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt]

Crowley’s experiment at Cefalù showed remarkably sophisticated mind-control tactics, especially considering he implemented them forty years before the Sullivanians or MK ULTRA; and sixty years before Zimbardo wrote about resisting social influence. However, Cefalù was always a control experiment, and an exercise in manipulating the British and American media, it was never a real spiritual movement. Cefalù was about controlling large groups of people.

To prove this point, I put it to readers that Crowley wrote a tourist brochure about his pornographic bedroom murals in the Abbey’s ‘Chamber of Nightmares’ as soon as the paintings were finished– before an innocent ‘spiritual explorer’ could have been sure that his painting ‘therapy’ even worked and before the Abbey had attracted anyone besides Crowley and his two concubines:

The brochure raptly assured potential visitors– from whom Crowley hoped to draw new disciples– that the purpose of the Chambre “is to pass students of the Sacred Wisdom through the ordeal of contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul. Candidates for this initiation are prepared by a certain secret process before spending the night in this room; the effect is that the figures on the walls seem actually to become alive, to bewilder and obsess the spirit that has dared to confront their malignity.” This secret process may have involved one or more drugs. Opium, ether, cocaine, heroin, laudanum, hashish, and anhalonium were in constant supply at the Abbey, and Crowley administered them to himself in the Chambre on an almost nightly basis. The brochure described, in the third person, the self-purgation that Crowley pursued in the Abbey:

“Those who have come successfully through the trial say that they have become immunized from all possible infection by those ideas of evil which interfere between the soul and its divine Self. Having been forced to fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell, they have attained permanent mastery of their minds. The process is similar to that of “Psycho-analysis”; it releases the subject from fear of Reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalizing and thus disarming the spectres that line in ambush for the Soul of Man.” [From Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

This [above] is an example of one of Crowley’s “nightmare” paintings at the Abbey:

As I mentioned before, Crowley struggled to attract ‘tourists’, and by the end of his life his only followers still sending Crowley money were in Los Angeles– the followers he had the least personal contact with. (Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist with high-level intelligence connections, was head of the Los Angeles Thelema chapter for a while.) Despite this failure, Crowley never lost his friends in dark places.

Crowley’s system of control was of interest to British military intel agent Capt. M.E. Townshend, one of many British spooks to have dealings with ‘The Beast’. Later in Crowley’s career he would establish a printing press with Major Robert Thynne and Major J. C.S. Mac Allen, called Mandrake Press, which was designed to publicise Crowley’s ideas. Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin can’t get his head around why the two Majors were interested in Crowley’s occult writing.(!)

Richard Spence, author of Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult opines that Crowley’s ‘real’ reason for being in Sicily was to spy on French and Italian naval movements at the behest of intel officer Everard Fielding, who I first mentioned in my post about “Hellish Nell“. Spence doesn’t attempt to explain Crowley’s relentless media courtship, which is only to be expected, as Spence (a Washington D.C. favorite) avoids investigating the parts of Crowley’s life which smell like occult-related psychological operations against the British public.

There are many people today who want to believe that Aleister Crowley was something more than an agent provocateur and an exploitative cult leader in His Majesty’s Service. They want to believe Crowley’s philosophizing has some merit beyond control, much like any cult member runs from the pain of disillusionment. I suggest that these desperate Crowley-believers have as much hope of finding spiritual enlightenment in the declassified MK ULTRA papers.

Throughout Crowley’s career (probably 1897 to his death), he used the cover of a magician or mystic during missions for British Intelligence– this fact doesn’t appear to cause contention. However, believers seem to assume that at some point the ‘cover’ transformed into a true religious quest and that Crowley’s courting the press– especially around his cult in Sicily– was something other than a psyop aimed at the Anglo-American public.

I encourage readers to consider the possibility that Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was conducted with the British public in mind; that Crowley’s scandalous media forays in the U.K. were no less ‘spooky’ than his scandalous media forays in NYC.

Nina Hamnett, a sort of ‘Roaring Twenties’ version of Tilda Swinton, was an acquaintance of Crowley and wrote this article for about him in 1934. Celebrities and similar scandals would ‘plague’ the Abbey during its short life in the early 1920s. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Even though the exploitative nature of Crowley’s undertakings has been well known since the 1930s, Crowley’s legacy was repackaged and marketed in the 1960s by cultural icons like Lucifer Rising creator Kenneth Anger, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Even today outfits like the BBC and the History Channel push Crowley, despite the fact that Emperor Aleister has no clothes. Is it possible that someone is still trying to mess with our heads?

Espionage and Occultism: The True Nature of Secret Societies

Espionage and Occultism: The True Nature of Secret Societies

editorial by Vincent Bridges For as long as the hairless, semi-domesticated Killer Ape has been making war on the tribe next door, there has been espionage; spying, sabotage and subversion, intrigue, double dealing and power grabs, all of which can be considered as varieties of espionage. In their original sense, these activities were simply forms of politics, a sort of tertiary boundary layer that served as social and political sensory organs. But the skin that touches can also be the hand that grips, and soon after humans stopped roaming and began to build villages and farms, covert, or hidden, forms of political feedback, espionage, settled firmly into the mode of control apparatus.

As such, it shifted from a political to a religious framework. Information gathering and maintaining cultural superiority became the responsibility of the great religious organizations and priesthoods. By the time of the late Roman Empire, when Church and State had effectively merged, espionage, in the official and political sense, was a function of the Church. Due to its monopoly on literacy, the Church remained in this position right up to the Renaissance.

However, it was that same monopoly that allowed another form of espionage to survive. The pagan, and therefore oral, traditions survived in various forms, and this oral tradition was supplanted by a curious phenomenon, the traveler’s tale. Ideas and heresies traveled along this tall tale highway as pilgrims and healers and mystics traveled from Spain to Russia, Jerusalem to Norway. Along with them moved tinkers and peddlers, adventurers and freebooters, the restless and the dispossessed, and eventually all of these groups would form provisional “tribes” and guilds. By the late Middle Ages, this underworld had become a powerful and authentic alternative culture that viewed espionage, information collecting, as a kind of commodity trading. Knowledge of stone working, soldiering or counterfeiting was proprietary to the group or tribe, tricks of the trade we might say, but available to the official culture for its use.

The Church began to lose its real power with the Black Death of the late 14th century, and within a century, a cultural Renaissance was underway. Part of that Renaissance was the emergence of what had been sub-culture in the medieval world into the official high culture. The sections of the medieval underworld that underwent the greatest transformation were occultism and espionage. The rulers of the new states that were forming in Italy and Western Europe were more than happy to make use of both groups, no matter what the increasingly discredited Church thought about it.

As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation battered Europe in the 16th century the golden age of occultism and espionage began. With Europe split along ideological lines, north and east Protestant, west and south Catholic, the opportunities for both professional spies and revolutionary minded occultists seemed limitless. Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain went toe to toe over the whole issue of Protestant versus Catholic, culminating in 1588’s Armada, and achieved a draw. But, far to the east, the junior branch of the Hapsburg clan, Rudolph II, followed an entirely different path, one of tolerance and humanism, flavored of course by a large dollop of mysticism. We can think of these two styles, conflict versus conciliation, and power centers/conflict points, as the poles or axis of the age, around which swirled both the best of the new “magi” and the rising profession of spy.

This golden age of espionage and occultism is the true origin point of our modern “secret societies.” The Rosicrucian movement of the early 17th century grew at least in part from Dr. John Dee’s apocalyptic missionary work in the 1580s, who, as Elizabeth I’s 007, is a prime example of the era’s overlap of occultism and espionage. These secret societies, instead of being either chivalric or guild based, were in fact more like a loose network of co-conspirators. Where they did collect into localized groups, they tended to form the early scientific organizations, the Royal Societies of England and France.

Between Dee and Bruno’s Hermetic Revolution of the late 16th century and the end of the religious wars in the late 17th century, new and very radical political ideas emerged. Democracy had been demonstrated when the people of England killed their King rather than go back to Catholicism; it wasn’t pleasant but it showed where the power actually lay in the new post Renaissance world. This split however led directly to the next round of “secret societies.”

Freemasonry, which had nothing to do with the stone mason’s guild of the Middle Ages, formed as a way to promote several different, and sometimes conflicting, political agendas. One of these was the preservation and restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the throne of England, while another was the attainment of a true democratic state, free from both kings and Church. These agendas were held together with the solid glue of occultism.

The ideals of these secret societies, derived ultimately from the occult humanism of the Renaissance, contributed to real revolutions, in America and France in the late 18th century. In the early 20th century, the swirl of occultism and espionage around the last Czar and his family produced a spontaneous revolution and the end of the Romanov dynasty. And of course, Hitlerian Germany was a product of the same overlapping confluence of occult concepts and direct espionage, and the same secret society-based mixture influenced even FDR’s New Deal. As late as the end of the 20th century, this same combination of influences would be used as a rationale for the genocide in the Balkans.

For the last 450 years, the search for esoteric knowledge and the practice of espionage have mingled and produced, sometimes, revolutionary results, both good and bad. Our modern world grew out of some of these results, and our awareness of that fact may allow us to reach back to that original humanism, that spark of democratic shamanism, that gave rise to the impulse to share our mystical experiences with the rest of the tribe.